The Transmission Control Protocol (“TCP”) is a communication protocol used to transmit streams of data between two computing systems, for example, a web server and a client computer. When the computing systems initiate a communication using TCP, even if the computers have communicated over the same network in the past, the computers do not have any information regarding the amount of traffic of the network. Thus, the web server typically assumes that the network is busy and sends information packets at a relatively slow rate. The web server may eventually adjust the speed at which information is sent during the connection. As a result, the network utilization rates for such TCP connections may be fairly low for shorter streams of data over high-speed networks. Thus, TCP may be considered inefficient in delivering data streams over high-speed networks, such as broadband networks.
To combat this problem, some computing systems may open up a fixed number of TCP connections to the same web server. However, the client computer still does not have any information about the speed of the network and thus the additional connections may again result in fairly low utilization rates. For example, some web browsing programs may open up 6 connections for a particular web server. This number may be too low for high-speed connections, or too high for lower-speed connections, such as dial-up, and again result in lower utilization rates.